Jun 14 2013
Don't Just Sit There, Do Something: The Internet of Things and Services.
Have you noticed how The Internet of Things, all those myriad of devices that connect through the internet, is now becoming dependent on The Services of Things? It used to be enough to have a great product but now people are discovering what happens when you hook those things up to the internet. But a connection is not enough, there needs to be a service – a customer-centric system – that makes that product's value exponentially greater.
[VIDEO: STEPHAN FERBER – Director of Communities & Partners Networks, Bosch Software Innovations. Besides doing a very good job of explaining the concepts behind the Internet of Things and Services, the gentleman can write backwards astonishingly well!]
Jun 06 2013
Android Tutorial: Optimizing for Phones and Tablets with Fragments
When Tablets Were Still Stone
A long, long, time ago, when the Android framework was being developed in the mid-2000’s, modern mobile phone screens were still small, and mostly flip, slider, and candy bar form factors. Almost all input came from hardware buttons, as touch screens were just starting to make it into consumer products. With that in mind, the Android engineers designed a user interface framework that would be flexible enough to fit almost any screen size and aspect ratio, and adaptable enough to support a plethora of hardware configurations. However, the scope of Android at that time was focused around mobile phones, and large screen “tablet” devices were not even on the horizon yet. Actually, at that time, the term “tablet” was still used to reference what are now called “convertible laptops”.
Activities and Views
Android engineers ultimately came up with a relatively simple user interface framework. Layouts were based on Activities, which host View elements that the user can interact with. In an Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture, an Activity acts as a Controller, while a View acts as (if it isn’t obvious) a View. User interface elements that user sees and interacts with are all Views: text, buttons, text fields, images, spinners, check boxes, switches, seek bars, lists, pagers, etc. Activities take those Views, arrange them into a screen layout, and manage their behavior as well as the application flow.
Jun 05 2013
A New Framework for Data Management?
I hold a strong prejudice that IT paradigms are useful for about 30 years. The PC was dominant from 1980 to 2010, “online” mainframe systems from 1970 to 2000, and so on. If that’s the case then time’s up for Bill Inmon’s data warehousing framework.
May 31 2013
Bulk Creation of SharePoint Site Columns and Content Types with PowerShell: Part 3
This post is the third in a series detailing the creation of SharePoint Site Columns and Content Types via PowerShell. The series has three parts as follows:
Part 1: Bulk Creating Site Columns with PowerShell
Part 2: Bulk Creating Content Types with PowerShell
Part 3: Bulk Adding Site Columns to Content Types with PowerShell
May 31 2013
Google I/O 2013: Volley Image Cache Tutorial
Google I/O 2013 has come to an end, and it has left us with great anticipation for the future of Android development. One of the more exciting things on display at I/O this year was a library called Volley. Volley is a library that handles the processing and caching of network requests, which saves developers from writing the same boilerplate code in virtually every application. Writing boilerplate code is never fun and is increases the chances of a mistake by the developer. It is with this in mind that Google has created Volley.
If you have not seen the Google I/O presentation on Volley, I encourage you to go watch it to get an understanding of the basics before continuing with this article.